Astro in savage

[Damianqq]

After healing Savage 1 as an AST, here are just the main things that I'd love to see changed:

Synastry: I would like the "50% heal deduction" as well as the cd for the skill to be lower (and/or make regen heals apply aswell).

Essential Dignity: Being as the only emergency heal, I think a lower cooldown would be welcomed by many.

Nocturnal Sect: I believe this really needs tweaking. I would leave the +5% heal, but make sure the barrier that it applies is bigger (150-200% of the heal?).

Shuffle: Make it so that you can not get the same card again, or lower the cd for "Draw".

Bole: I would make it so that "Damage dealt can not exceed 10% of target's maxmimum HP".

Collective Unconscious: I honestly think this skill needs to get more love. What if you were to reduce the channeling time and up the potency of the regen? For Nocturnal stance, maybe make it so that "Party members inside can not lose more than 10% of their maximum HP"?

[Remilia_Nightfall]

After healing Savage 1 as an AST, here are just the main things that I'd love to see changed:


Nocturnal Sect: I believe this really needs tweaking. I would leave the +5% heal, but make sure the barrier that it applies is bigger (150-200% of the heal?).

Bole: I would make it so that "Damage dealt can not exceed 10% of target's maxmimum HP".

Collective Unconscious: I honestly think this skill needs to get more love. What if you were to reduce the channeling time and up the potency of the regen? For Nocturnal stance, maybe make it so that "Party members inside can not lose more than 10% of their maximum HP"?

Ehm...now let's not get overboard. These things would be way too OP. Let's try to be realistic.

[Arcana]

My posible changes in Nocturnal would be:

Aspected Benefic: 0 healing, 400 potency shield, 10 seconds CD
Collective Unconscious: extends card duration effect on the members while they're inside and -30% dmg taken.
Aspected Helios: Equal to Medica II (its ok SE,we wont be OP if you do this in Aspected Helios...)

I think -30% dmg taken is the minimun we should get with a channeled ability (we cant do anything more while channeling)

[PetiteMalFleur]

-The range on Aspected Helios is just too short. With such large arenas we struggle with range.
-I like the Lightspeed changes.
-I like the shorter CD on shuffle but drawing the same card really kills our utility.
-Nocturnal stance is just bad. The shields are too small and too costly to maintain. Maybe if the stance also reduced the mana cost of Aspected Helios and Aspected Benefic.
-Why don't ast hots stack? I'm trying to imagine a 24 man with 6 astrologians who can't stack hots on the MT. 6 white mages can stack hots. What is so OP about ast that they can't as well? I seriously dread queueing a roulette as an astrologian to get paired with another astrologian. Instead of being able to choose a play style one of us is forced to use nocturnal stance, which is just really horrible to heal in.
-Gravity. Same cost as Holy but without any additional utility. This should provide a slow be adjusted to reflect how it Jutsu isn't as good. It should also be a sub 50 skill.
-Ast dps is ridiculously low until 54. To the point I really struggled with the limited dps. I wished I had leveled my scholar first to clear msq instances. They were hard and took me twice as long to kill the needed mobs as my Whm friend who just burned everything with holy. I will never queue as ast for high level roulette because I cannot help dps as hard to clear it due to level sync 50.

[Kaizersan]

Oh, okay. I thought we disagreed on AST needing buffs.

Carry on, then.

Like I have said before if they change CU to a placement non channel move AST overall healing ability would jump up to the other healers easily with just that little change.

[Damianqq]

Ehm...now let's not get overboard. These things would be way too OP. Let's try to be realistic.

If you think about it, its not that OP. With a 150% shield, its not up to par with an adlo, especially not if it crits. It would be better than succor in that sense, but only with a +50 potency. An sch still has Deployment/Emergency tastics aswell.

Keep in mind that getting a Bole is completely random. You would have to save the card in order to use it at the right time, in which case you already sacrifice enough. They could even reduce the buff to only last 10 seconds or increase the dmg cap to 20% of max HP. Either way, it would have a very situational use.

Collective Unconscious, again, I believe that the buff duration is key. Make it short (5-10s), with better potency. Because of completely limiting your actions/movement as well as your team's, it would only be useful in specific/transitional phases during a raid.

[Zholi]

I think I am only seeing the same few people agree. Alot of people also feel that Astrologian job is in a very good place and will perform as well as the other healers in Savage which they seem to be doing well in.

No. A lot of people do not think that. Just about the only ones who do are the handful of people posting that on this forum. Do you know how many people think AST is in a "very good place" right now in the 100+ page thread about them on the JP forums? Exactly zero. Like it or not, in light of literally thousands of examples of negative feedback, AST is going to be changed, despite the fact that about five people on the Western forum feel an inexplicable need to shout from the rooftops that everything is fine even as the world crumbles all around them. This kind of behavior seems to be a distinctly Western phenomenon. Our forum is a cesspool of idiocy and argumentation, as a select few feel the need to shout down the opinions of the majority every few posts, and distract from providing constructive feedback as we have to drop everything to surgically dismantle your fallacious and frankly delusional "points." People talk about the "silent majority" who think AST is fine. On what grounds do you say this? The posts that point out the issues with AST garner in some cases hundreds of likes, while the posts that say everything is fine struggle to break out of the single-digit ghetto. The majority of people I see in-game seem to think AST is in a very bad spot, and the longer the job is allowed to languish in its current state, the more those numbers grow.

Unfortunately, the forums for our language are virtually useless for constructive feedback. On the Japanese forums, instead of everyone feeling the need to post and repost the same opinions endlessly, they make copious use of the "like" button. Posts routinely garner 40+ likes, even hundreds of pages into a thread. You can see at a glance with a numerical value how most people feel about something. Here you'd be lucky to gather even a single shred of useful information from the noise. I do not envy the job of the American and European community teams in trying to select useful bits of feedback from this mess to have translated and relayed to the developers.

As someone who had been looking forward to AST before its release, and playing it regularly since, I have a particular interest in this issue and have been following it closely. I have looked carefully at data points from all sources I can find, and by absolutely every objective measurement, AST is inferior to the other two healers, and I assure you this is much to my chagrin. It gives me absolutely no pleasure to say that this is the worst release-state we've ever seen for a job in FFXIV since its relaunch to date, eclipsing even the debacle of 2.0 Warrior by quite a bit. The situation is dire, and I cannot emphasize this enough. I am in one of the top two free companies in the world and help with the management thereof. I personally know all of the top English-speaking players (and more importantly, healers) in the world, and I hope they don't mind me saying this, but not a single one of them has a favorable opinion of AST. And, apologies to everyone else, quality of opinion does matter when it comes to these issues, and these people have a higher quality of opinion than anyone else I know. When it comes to the efficacy and balance of jobs in a raiding environment, we are experts. We have to be to compete on the world progression stage.

All of that said, I am speaking for myself, and not on behalf of the FC. Hence I am not mentioning them by name. I am not in any of our world top 3 groups. However, I have done progression raiding at a high level, and have achieved world and/or server top 10 on various things. With suboptimal jobs. Jobs that SE had to buff on account of their weakness. Never has anything been as bad for any job as it is for AST right now.

Here are my personal opinions on the abilities of Astrologian:

• Lightspeed - Initially worthless, the most recent update made this marginally beneficial to use. It is still extremely underwhelming, however. For a 150 second cooldown, it allows you to cast 3-4 spells at a slightly reduced cost, with little to no cast time. It still activates the global cooldown, so it provides little to no benefit to healing throughput.
  
• Enhanced Lightspeed - This trait is useless, especially in light of the recent adjustments. Nobody will ever use Lightspeed for attack magic.
  
• Luminiferous Aether - Essentially a copy of Shroud of Saints. This is the only reliable form of MP restoration AST has. With SCH's historical lack of mana issues, along with WHM gaining Assize, leaving AST with the same MP situation as a 2.0 WHM is inexcusable. The fact that we can use Ewer to cover this weakness is simply not a justification for the situation. In order to consistently match the MP regeneration of the other healers, we would have to draw Ewer at a statistically impossible rate.
  
• Enhanced Benefic - Useless. Still have to wait for the GCD. Does nothing but force you to check whether you have the buff or not so it doesn't throw off your timing.
  
• Essential Dignity - There is nothing inherently wrong with this skill. It is instant, off the GCD, and it heals. However, as our only emergency cooldown, the benefit of its relatively short recast is lost. We must jealously guard this, at is the only thing that can possibly hope to dig us out of a bad situation.
  
• Stella - Useless. Low potency, very niche effect, takes up an ability slot in a job that is desperately hurting for useful ones. The additional effect could easily have been rolled in with Malefic, as Malefic becomes completely obsolete at 60.
  
• Disable - Only usable on attacks with cast bars. Some things you want/need to mitigate do not have cast bars. Prone to getting eaten by an auto-attack in many situations.
  
• Synastry - Decent, but the recast is simply too high for what it does. Additionally, it is restricted to direct single target heals.
  
• Time Dilation - Decent.
  
• Collective Unconscious - Useless. Being unable to move or act in order to retain the effect is an extremely high penalty that isn't worth what is given in return. The effect needs to be very good to justify the extreme cost of maintaining it.
  
• Celestial Opposition - Useless. A stun on a 150s cooldown is laughable, as is a 5 second increase in buffs. If this skill were removed from the game just about nothing would change enough to notice.
  
• Cards - Useless. That's right. Taken as a whole, they are useless. The buff strength is simply too small. Their power needs to be boosted so much that most people's initial reaction will be that the developers have gone overboard. The only thing that will allow the card system as a whole to be useful is for individual buffs to be very powerful. Because of the randomness of cards, these effects that at first glance seem extreme will balance out over time. Some of the card effects may even need to be changed entirely (Spear).
  
• Nocturnal Sect - Useless. The effective HPS, even after shields are taken into account, is astonishingly low. In Nocturnal Sect, AST is the only healer in the game without some form of passive healing that can be active at virtually all times. For WHM it is Regen effects. For SCH it is their fairy. For Diurnal AST it is Regen effects. For Nocturnal AST it is nothing. To add insult to injury, their shielding ability is far worse than SCH. The healing increase provided by the stance itself is also effectively useless and does nothing to cover these weaknesses.

I hope you are prepared for an extremely heavy workload if you want to fix this job. I also encourage you to improve your testing protocol, because releasing a job in this state is not something that should ever happen.

[DarkmoonVael]

Greetings,

Thanks for the feedback!

We'd like to share the dev. team's thoughts and approach in regards to the current balance of astrologians.

• Astrologian's healing potency and cards effects

  Astrologian's healing potency and card effects were set with a party's total offensive and defensive capabilities in mind, as they can increase various effects of other party members using their cards.
  
  The development team is observing player progression in raids and dungeons to ensure the game balance is set up appropriately for each piece of content. If they feel it needs further adjustments, they'll consider making adjustments based on player data and feedback.
  

• Future feedback

  The development team is constantly observing in-game data, but they're also using the feedback received on the forums when making future adjustments. Comments regarding how astrologians feel when healing throughout the various areas of content is very useful, so please continue to send us specific requests on each action's effect when battling through the different instances.

Hi Grekumah, thanks for the responses.

In regards to healing potency, its not the major issue on AST. Its in the inability to bring the same style of "emergency" healing to raid group that SCH and WHM can right now. The responsiveness of AST purely as a healer in cutting edge content just is not there, and sadly this is one class that really has to be first and foremost analysed as a healer by raid groups, with the support functionality taking a very far back seat. The way progression raids are healed relies on the healer duo to be able to respond to situations rapidly so they dont spiral out of control, these tend to be situations that are not forseen, and have to be responded to there and then (like a dps standing in something they shouldnt have, and add aggroing on a healer for too long, tank busters criticaling etc). For these situation SCH has Lustrate, Indomnibility and arguably Emergency Tactics and Dissipate whilst WHM has Benediction, Tetragrammaton and Assize. What AST has is Essential Dignity, one thing. Its simply not enough to be able to respond in the same way a WHM or SCH does in progression raids. Add to this the massive disparity between Nocturnal Sect and Diurnal Sect and we have issues.

The way Collective Unconcious operates in Nocturnal Sect actually makes it a dead ability except for boss transition phases. The way SCH has to use Sacred Soil in progression based raid is to further mitigate boss transitions, further mitigate targeted abilities at other party members and further mitigate aoe damage. Collective Unconcious can only really be used fully in the first example, and certainly can not be used in the second since these abilities often come in the form of a small aoe hitting the party member which you, as an AST healer, can not afford to be hit by. Take for example T13 progression with mega-flares. As SCH these needed to be Sacred Soiled, as an AST in Nocturnal Sect, you would need to mitigate this as much as possible, however, unless you got targetted yourself by them, Collective Unconcious is not usable, as you simply can not run over to them, put the shield up, and get hit by the mega-flare when you were not a target of it yourself. So, if Collective Unconcious is kept in its current form in Nocturnal Sect, it would mean that for an AST to replace a SCH in progression raid groups, these kind of mechanics will have to never be implimented again. What we have in Nocturnal Sect is an AST trying to be a mitigation healer yet lacking entirely the panoply of spells and shields that are required to not only successfully mitigate damaged, but also the support functionality in terms of raw healing that is also needed to support the mitigation style of healing. In its current iteration, a Nocturnal Sect AST can not replace a SCH in a progression raid group, and these seems to be a bit of a design flaw.

Even in terms of its support functionality on AST, where as you can set up some powerful combinations with the cards, it is entirely based on RNG. If the AST is being pushed towards more support, less healing (hilarious in itself since there are no support classes in the game, only DPS, Tanks and Healers), then this support functionality has to be tied less to RNG. MCH and BRD bring support that has no reliance on RNG at all; you sing the right song at the right time or you promote your turret at the right time. AST has to set up its support through RNG, which can not be relied upon in a raid.

Finally, the way this game is designed, especially in raid, is there is a hard healing check. Always a hard, set-in-stone healing check. You meet that check or you fail. This healing check can not be helped out by any other party members except the 2 healers. It is not like a DPS check where everyone can contribute with healers going into cleric stance and tanks going into dps stance/using STR accessories. There is no helping the healers with their healing checks. A healer class in this game has to be able to meet these checks in progression raids, AST is struggling with this. Even the people who have taken AST into savage have stated it put too much of a burden on the ASt healing partner and it makes the progression harder with an AST in the party. This should not be the case. If AST healing capabilities are not changed with the addition of more "emergency heals" (one really is not enough), then AST has to be able to boost the healing potential of their partner, which it simply does not happen at the moment. If it is going to focus on more support, less healing, AST catagorically has to be able to boost potencies, healing through-put and mana management of your healing partner. So far it does the latter, albeit linked to RNG card draws.

AST needs reconsidering in its current form. Its design does not match up to the design philosophies the developers have centred the raids around. You simply can not have a healing class in the game that does not meet that standards of a progression based raid healer. AST feels on par to a lvl 50 SCH/WHM, and can not compete with a lvl 60 one. It lacks in major departments when it comes to a healer, and this is what it has to be first and foremost; AST catagorically has to be able to heal at the same level of SCH and WHM, if it cant, its support functionality has to branch out into the increase of healing potencies, healing through-put and mana management of the AST healing partner. It does neither at the moment, making it a very underwhelming class to play, and a class that progression based raid groups will more than likely side line. If AST is balanced the same way that every other class in the game is (top down, can perform in raids, ergo can perform everywhere), then i believe it would have major changed to it to reflect that fact its a healer, and has to be able to heal top end content. At the moment, it feels like its tuned bottom-up, to lvl 50 content and not lvl 60 content, and has never seen use in true end game content to test its primary function in healing progression raids. The tuning is taken further by the fact that Nocturnal Sect simply can not compete with a SCH, period. A class like AST has to bring a full suit of abilities that make it able to replace either WHM OR SCH, and it can not do this either at the moment. The class is imbalanced totally and utterly; imbalanced in its healing (or lack of) abilities, imbalanced in its Sect functionality making Nocturnal Sect unable to replace a SCH catagorically, imbalaced in it support functionality unable to make up for its own lack of healing by boosting the healing of its healing partner.

I would love to change from SCH to AST for progression raids, but can not due to the above.

[Lastelli]

Nice text wall. Some people keep defending this job, but they either have no idea how powerful WHM and SCH have become (they only use AST) or they simply have no idea how broken AST is in its current form because they only use SCH or WHM.
AST should be completely revamped for a number of reasons, the most important being the fallacity of the cards system and the fact that as a healer it just sucks. As Remilia pointed out, making cards too strong would trivialize dps checks and this is a serious problem, but right now they are just useless and tbh I can't see a solution other than completely reworking how cards work. I'll be honest, I think that AST just needs more skills...but I know this is impossible (remember how much we had to wait for stoneskin ii?). On the other hand, there's no way to fix it by slightly changing some skills. Please, revamp it, and do it fast.

[Akyio]

In my opinion :

Synastry should be a permanent cast.

Cards Should all be AoE already, the buffs on royal road should have to be reworked to not make AoE too powerful, but that's what I think. I dont think that 10% dmg increase is OP, or 10% dmg reduction for 15 seconds is Op in any way.

Collective Unconscious Should be reworked, it shouldn't be channeling ability, but rather a quick cast ability that expands in range up to ~25 yards, in diurnal healing everyone for a decent amount of maybe ~400 potency(similar to SCH new AoE heal), in diurnal it should be 200 heal and 200 shield. That wouldnt be OP because it's on a long cooldown and very situational. I think this ability should be our little "AoE emergency". And the channeling should go away and be replaced with a cast time of 2-3 seconds, while range is expanding.

But Nocturnal needs another way to be reworked too. Time dilation does nothing for it, celestial opposition doesn't do anything for it as well. Those should increase or recharge shields.
I would honestly like to see aspected benefic get a cast time of ~1.5 seconds, to see the total potency increase from 500 to 540~, and ability to crit. It would still be weaker than adloquim, but it would feel more like being able to put a powerful shield.

For the last part, cooldown on Luminous Ether should be reduced to give us some more mana and not to use our all utility(ewer cards) on ourselves to try to keep up to a WHM or SCH mana levels, and still fall behind by substituting our entire utility option.

These changes might sound like OP, but i don't think they are, because if you look closely to WHM or SCH abilities, those both classes are OP compared to AST.